Treasure Hunters

by James Patterson

Tommy and I hurried down into the hull.

  The pirate leader was pounding on the steel door to The Room.

  Then a couple of his goons tried prying the door open with the muzzles of their rifles. After a lot of grunting and groaning, five of them started kicking the door—never a particularly bright move when you’re wearing water socks.

  “Okay, Skipper Dipper,” the red-faced leader said to Tommy. “Where’s the freaking key?”

  Tommy shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “Our Dad had it when he fell overboard,” I added.

  “What?” said the pirate boss.

  “Well, you see, there was this storm. The sky darkened. The wind came whipping up out of the west. ‘Lie ahull, laddies!’ Dad cried from the wheelhouse, as he fought with the wheel to keep us from capsizing. I was up in the crow’s nest, my shirt shredded into tatters by the howling, gale-force winds…”

  The pirate goons were hanging on my every word.

  Except the boss guy.

  He racked back the bolt on his machine gun. “The key, kid. Where is it?”

  “At the bottom of the sea,” I said, trying to fake-sob the way Uncle Timothy did. “In Davy Jones’s locker with dear old Dad. BWAAAAH!”

  “Quit crying, kid. Where’s the spare?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “What?”

  “Our dad, may he rest in peace, was kind of cheap. Bought all his shirts at Kmart. And keys for that lock cost, like, ten bucks each. You have to see a locksmith. You can’t just go to the nearest Ace Hardware and—”

  “Trash the boat!” yelled the pirate leader.

  “Woo-hoo!” his rowdy friends shouted in reply.

  Suddenly, sheets and blankets were being yanked off our bunk beds. Pillows were flying. Somebody stuffed a coconut head in a commode and flushed it, flooding the floor. Everything that wasn’t bolted down or nailed to the walls was knocked over, kicked, dinged, and totally trashed. They even smashed the glass of our Titanic steak knife display case. The little guy with the ponytail drop-kicked the conquistador helmet across the parlor at his buddy, who was slashing our string of jalapeño pepper party lights.

  I looked to Tommy.

  “It’s just stuff,” he mumbled. “Let it go.”

  Fortunately, we had already traded all our gold doubloons with Miss Laticia, and Storm had been clever enough to stash our aluminum suitcase full of cash in one of The Lost’s many hidey-holes.

  The pirate leader stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

  “Playtime’s over, dudes. We need to report back to the man. Let’s grab the backup package and boogie.”

  The thieves scampered out of the cabins and deckhouse and started firing their weapons into the air like Yosemite Sam.

  “Stay here!” Tommy yelled, racing after the pirates.

  Yeah, right.

  I charged up the stairs after him, but I could hear the pirates’ skiff motors already firing up.

  We found Storm still up in the wheelhouse, but now she was crying like crazy.

  “What’s wrong?” I hollered. “Where’s Beck?”

  “The pirates! They took her!”

  That’s when it hit me: Beck was their “backup package.”

  CHAPTER 31

  I’d never felt so sick in my life.

  I had the chills. Then I was burning up with fever. I was even throwing up over the side of the boat.

  Yes, I was seasick, even though the boat wasn’t moving.

  Tommy had decided to drop anchor and work the radio. He’d alerted the Coast Guard to the kidnapping. He’d asked our new friends at the Miami PD to issue an all-points bulletin and an Amber Alert.

  Meanwhile, Storm was in The Room, running through an FBI database on the web, trying to match the pirate faces she had recently memorized with mug shots on a known-felon list.

  I guessed Tommy would’ve called Uncle Timothy, too, but Uncle Timothy had never given us his cell phone number.

  Me?

  I was basically useless.

  I spent several hours hugging a railing up in the bow pulpit. Moaning. Groaning. Puking.

  It was like someone had sawed me in half.

  (Yeah, I’m kind of waiting for Beck to draw a picture of that: me split in two. Maybe by a crazed pirate magician with a chain saw. But Beck isn’t here to see what a wreck I am, so she can’t draw me.)

  Losing my twin sister is the worst thing to ever happen to me, because we’ve been together our whole lives. Think about it. We were together before we were even born.

  This was worse than losing Mom and Dad.

  Beck, of course, would violently disagree with that.

  So, since she wasn’t there, I had Twin Tirade No. 429—with myself.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Bickford!” I shouted, pitching my voice slightly higher, so I sounded like Beck. “How can losing one person be worse than losing two?”

  “Um, hello? I’ve known you nine months longer than I knew either of them.”

  “Right. Those first nine months were so exciting—”

  “They were! Remember how we used to kick Mom in the stomach?”

  “That was your idea, Bickford.”

  “You did it, too, Rebecca.”

  “Because you have always been a bad influence on me.”

  “Me? What about you?”

  “I never made you do anything stupid, Bick.”

  “What about that time I ate a booger?”

  “That was your idea, boogerhead.”

  “It was not!”

  “Was too.”

  “Wasn’t.”

  “Was!”

  “Oh. You’re right. It was.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “My bad.”

  “No worries. We’re cool.”

  I took a pause from yelling at myself.

  “So, Bick?” I asked in my Beck voice.

  “Yeah, Beck?”

  “How’d that booger taste?”

  I didn’t answer.

  I just leaned out over the side of the boat and hurled again.

  CHAPTER 32

  So this is me, four hours after the pirates struck.

  (For the record, I have, in Beck’s absence, taken over the drawings. It might be a little hard to tell us apart. Tommy will no longer have a buff bod. Or cool hair. I apologize.)

  It took about eight more hours for Tommy and Storm to finally shake me out of my state of shock.

  “Come on, little bro,” said Tommy. “Snap out of it!”

  “We need you, Bick,” said Storm. “Beck wouldn’t want you to be this sad.”

  “You guys are right. I need to pull myself together!”

  (Man, how I wish Beck were here to draw a picture of that! Me pulling myself together. Maybe screwing my head onto my butt; putting my feet where my hands should be. For now, you’ll just have to use your imagination. Thanks.)

  Anyway, I was trying to stay optimistic. But it was hard. Especially when the sun started to set and Storm and Tommy started talking about Beck as if she were dead, too.

  “You know, I’ll miss how she used to do those drawings of the seagulls and fish,” said Storm. “She didn’t need a photographic memory to get every detail just right.”

  “Remember her first painting?” said Tommy with a chuckle.

  “Yeah,” said Storm. “That finger-painting number on the walls of the nursery. She used a jar of baby food. Creamed spinach. Mom and Dad called it her ‘green period.’ ”

  “Yeah,” said Tommy, remembering the scene. “But I swear, she totally nailed Oscar the Grouch.”

  “Um, you guys?” I said. “Are we having another funeral at sea here?”

  “Nah,” said Tommy. “We’re just, you know, thinking about Beck.”

  “You want me to run down to the cabin and grab her Marlins cap?” blurted Storm. “We could toss it into the ocean like we did with Dad’s captain hat.”

  “You guys?” I said. “Come on. You’re freaking me out. Beck
is not dead.”

  Tommy draped his arm over my shoulder. “And she never will be, bro. Not as long as we keep her here.” He tapped his heart.

  Man, I thought, could this get any worse?

  And then, of course, it did.

  I heard the whine of a motorboat in the distance. And it didn’t sound like the pirates’ skiffs.

  Now what?

  CHAPTER 33

  Amazingly, some good news came sailing our way.

  The boat emerging out of the sunset and gunning for us—its bow skimming across the waves like a side-armed skip stone—was Uncle Timothy’s aerodynamic speedboat. Uncle Timothy was at the wheel.

  And Beck was standing at his side.

  Her 3-D glasses were strapped on tight, both arms held up high, hair blowing in the breeze. She screamed, “Cowabunga!” as the sleek silver boat bounded across the rolling ocean like a rocket ship.

  (As you can see, Beck skipped the tears, hugging, and other mushy junk that happened when we were all reunited on the deck of The Lost. Instead, she went with the action scene. Yes, Beck. It was a superawesome entrance, and you looked totally cool. Good call.)

  “Uncle Timothy rescued me!” Beck said excitedly. “And get this, you guys: They have a submarine!”

  “Who?” I said.

  “The pirates! I didn’t see it, because they kept me blindfolded the whole time, but I heard them say stuff like ‘Tie off to the submarine’ and ‘Take her down into the submarine,’ which, if they wanted to keep the submarine a secret, was totally stupid.”

  “Didn’t the blindfold crush your 3-D glasses?” asked Storm, who I think was tired of seeing Beck wear them.

  “Nah. They told me to take them off before they did the whole blindfold bit.”

  “And you rescued her?” Tommy said to Uncle Timothy.

  “Let’s just say I negotiated her release. They’re pirates. All they want is money—from stolen goods or ransom fees. It makes no difference to scum like that.”

  “How much did I cost?” asked Beck. “Was it, like, a million bucks?”

  Uncle Timothy grinned. “We came to terms.”

  “Well, I’m glad you did!”

  “Me too,” I said, feeling whole again, now that Beck was safe. “Did they hurt you?”

  “No. They just kept asking me a bunch of questions. It was like one of those interrogation scenes in a spy movie. They even hooked me up to a lie detector machine!”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. They wrapped this bulky Velcro thing around my wrist and slid my fingers into these electrode cups.”

  “I thought you were blindfolded,” said Storm.

  “I was,” said Beck. “But the pirates all went ‘upstairs’ to talk to ‘The Man’ when they ran out of questions. So I slipped the bandana up real quick and peeked.”

  “What’d you see?” I asked.

  “The lie detector paper with lots of squiggly lines and some other junk. Like an ashtray filled with soggy cigar butts.”

  I had a feeling Beck might’ve seen something else but didn’t want to say what it was in front of everybody. “What kind of questions were they asking you?”

  “Everything! They wanted to know about Dad’s most recent treasure hunts and Mom disappearing in Cyprus. Then, get this, they started asking a lot of art questions like ‘Have you ever seen Van Gogh’s Poppy Flowers or Cézanne’s Boy in a Red Waistcoat?’ ”

  “The photos Dad had down in The Room?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I told the truth. I said, ‘No, I have never seen those paintings.’ ”

  “But you have,” said Storm.

  “No. All I’ve seen are photographs, not the paintings!”

  “So you beat the machine?” I said.

  “Totally,” said Beck. “Because I wasn’t telling a lie.”

  At that moment, I was exceptionally proud to be Beck’s twin.

  “Wait a second,” said Tailspin Tommy. “How did those pirates know what pictures Dad had pinned to the walls in The Room? Did they, like, drill a peephole in the door or something?”

  “There’s no hole in the door,” Storm said. “Besides, Dad’s photographs of those paintings weren’t in The Room when the pirates boarded The Lost. I’d hidden them.”

  “Right,” said Tommy. “I forgot that part. I’m glad you remembered.”

  “So how did they know?” I mumbled. “Not just about the paintings. About Mom and Cyprus. Everything.”

  Beck turned to Storm. “Here’s the worst part. More than anything, they wanted The Key.”

  “Did you tell them where it was?” asked Tommy, that dizzy tailspin look in his eyes again.

  “Um, no. Only Storm knows where it’s hidden, remember?”

  “Oh. Riiiight. Forgot that part, too.”

  “Well,” said Uncle Timothy, who, if you ask me, had stayed a little too quiet the whole time Beck told us her kidnapping tale, “it seems the pirates shanghaied the wrong daughter. They should’ve kidnapped Storm.”

  CHAPTER 34

  “They can’t have Storm, either!” I said, eyeballing Uncle Timothy pretty hard.

  “Just a joke, Bickford. No reason to get all bent out of shape, son.”

  Actually, there was a reason to twist myself into a pretzel: There was something suspicious going on. Something weird about Uncle Timothy.

  “So, Uncle Timothy,” I said, “thanks for bringing Beck back.”

  “You’re welcome, Bickford.”

  “Quick question.”

  “Yes?”

  “How did you know where the pirates had taken her?”

  I couldn’t tell how Uncle Timothy reacted to my question because his eyes were still shielded behind their silver mirrors. Also, nothing on his face budged or twitched. The man might have been chiseled out of marble.

  “My boat,” he finally said, gesturing toward the floating rocket ship tied off to our stern, “is equipped with sophisticated radio scanners. I happened to be monitoring a band of frequencies known to be employed by those in the pirating trade.”

  I raised my hand.

  “Yes, Bickford?” Uncle Timothy sighed.

  “Got another question for ya.”

  “Yes?”

  “How come the pirates called Beck the ‘backup package’?”

  “Most likely their initial target was something else. Probably The Key to The Room. They took Beck as a backup.”

  (Did you notice how he totally avoided explaining why the pirates used the word package, a term Uncle Timothy uses all the time? Yeah, me, too.)

  “I have a question, too,” said Storm.

  “My goodness,” Uncle Timothy said with a pretty fake chuckle. “This is worse than the grilling those pirates gave Rebecca.”

  “How did you know where the pirates’ submarine was located?”

  “I told you. I tracked their radio transmissions.”

  “No. You said you monitored ‘a band of frequencies known to be employed by those in the pirating trade.’ ”

  “Do you have gear on your ship to pinpoint the transmission site, too?” asked Tommy, because he loves cool gadgets.

  “Look, kids,” said Uncle Timothy. (Quick observation: Whenever a grown-up calls a group of kids “kids,” you know they’re about to not tell you something.) “I can’t answer all these questions right now. You just have to trust me.”

  We all nodded.

  But I noticed that my siblings, even Tailspin Tommy, were eyeing Uncle Timothy the way I’d been eyeing him earlier.

  Who was this Uncle Timothy who wasn’t really our uncle?

  Whose side was he really on?

  Ours?

  The pirates’?

  Or was he in league with somebody we hadn’t even met yet?

  CHAPTER 35

  As we sailed north, towing Uncle Timothy’s boat behind us, my suspicions about the mysterious man in the mirrored sunglasses continued to grow.

  By the way, he didn
’t allow any of us to board his boat or check out the cool gizmos inside. That made my doubts grow bigger than mutant, radioactive tomatoes.

  “Something’s fishy about Uncle Timothy,” I confided to Beck.

  “It’s his safari vest,” said Beck. “I think he was gutting tuna before he rescued me.”

  “I’m serious!”

  “I know. And for what it’s worth, I think there’s something shady about him, too.”

  “Do you think he found you on the pirates’ submarine because he’s working with the pirates?”

  “It’s a possibility. Plus, Dad probably told Uncle Timothy about The Room.…”

  “… And he told the pirates.”

  “That’s how they knew about the photographs of the paintings.…”

  “… And what happened to Mom in Cyprus. Family meeting?”

  “Yeah,” said Beck. “I have an idea. Something I picked up in the pirate submarine.”

  “Like using a lie detector on him?”

  “Something better.”

  We rounded up Storm and Tommy and had a quick meeting up on the poop deck.

  Beck showed us the slender box she had “borrowed” from her pirate captors.

  “You stole that?” said Storm.

  “Hey, they were going to use it on me. Besides, is it really against the law to steal stuff from people who have nothing on board their boat but stuff they’ve stolen from other people’s boats?”

  Tommy nodded thoughtfully. “Wow. That’s heavy, Beck.”

  Just then, Uncle Timothy strolled out of the deckhouse and stretched his arms, taking in the warm sunshine bathing the back end of our boat.

  “That’s a dumb plan, Bickford!” shouted Beck, shooting me a wink, to let me know Twin Tirade No. 430 was intended solely for Uncle Timothy’s ears.

  “Oh, yeah? Well, what’s your plan, Rebecca?”

  “Easy! We steal those stupid sunglasses he’s always wearing and make him sit in the sun!”

  “And how’s that going to make him tell us the truth?”

  “He has sensitive eyes!”